Field
This disclosure is generally related to a content centric network (CCN). More specifically, this disclosure is related to using anonymous datagrams for routing CCN packets.
Related Art
The proliferation of the Internet and e-commerce continues to fuel revolutionary changes in the network industry. Today, a significant number of information exchanges, from online movie streaming to daily news delivery, retail sales, and instant messaging, are conducted online. An increasing number of Internet applications are also becoming mobile. However, the current Internet operates on a largely location-based addressing scheme. The most ubiquitous protocol, the Internet Protocol (IP), is based on location-based address. That is, a consumer of content can only receive the content by explicitly requesting the content from an address (e.g., IP address) closely associated with a physical object or location. A request that has a URL with an IP address for a specific organization causes the request to go to that organization's servers and not to those of another organization.
Recently, content centric networking (CCN) architectures have been proposed in the industry. CCN brings a new approach to content transport. Instead of having network traffic viewed at the application level as end-to-end connections over which content travels, content is requested or returned based on its unique location-independent name, and the network is responsible for routing content from the provider to the consumer.
With content centric networks, there are generally two types of CCN messages: Interests and Content Objects. An Interest message includes a name for a Content Object, and a client can disseminate the Interest over CCN to obtain the Content Object from any CCN node that hosts the Content Object. The Interest is forwarded toward a CCN node that advertises at least a prefix of the Interest's name. If this CCN node can provide the Content Object, this node can return the Content Object (along the Interest's reverse path) to satisfy the Interest.
The CCN nodes generally use a forwarding information base (FIB) and a pending interest table (PIT) to map name prefixes to a neighbor via which the named content can be obtained. However, the FIB can become substantially large as the number of content producers grows across CCN, which may slow the lookup times at each node along a path between a content consumer and a content producer.
To make matters worse, the size of a node's PIT can increase in proportion to the number of pending Interests at the node. This may allow malicious entities to perform an Interest-flooding attack that virtually disables CCN forwarder nodes by flooding their PITs with erroneous Interests.